Falling Film Evaporation of Water on Horizontal Configured Tube Bundles

This paper reports an experimental study on falling film evaporation of water on 6-row horizontal configured tube bundles in a vacuum. Three types of configured tubes, Turbo-CAB-19fpi and −26fpi, Korodense, including smooth tubes for reference, were tested in a range of film Reynolds number from about 10 to 110. Results show that as the falling film Reynolds number increases, falling film evaporation goes from tubes partial dryout regime to fully wet regime; the mean heat transfer coefficients reach peak values in the transition point. Turbo-CAB tubes have the best heat transfer enhancement of falling film evaporation in both regimes, but Korodense tubes’ overall performances are better when tubes are fully wet. The inlet temperature of heating water has hardly any effects on the heat transfer, but the evaporation pressure has controversial effects. A correlation with errors within 10% was also developed to predict the heat transfer enhancement capacity.